Lego fail

I saw the Lego Movie a few weekends ago and it really is fun. I enjoyed it a lot and I'm one of millions brainwashed by the "Everything Is Awesome" song. It made me remember how much fun it is to play with Lego bricks too, so I bought a few inexpensive sets and had a great time building from the instructions. I thought I could pick up a box here and there as I could afford it, and eventually I'd have enough bricks to build whatever I liked.

Since I've now written seven Lizzy and Jo short stories, a novella, and I'm working on a novel with those characters, naturally my goal is to build an airship with Legos and play with it when I'm supposed to be writing. I can't afford the big Lego sets that would allow me to make an airship yet, but there are a million Lego mini-figures and I thought I could get some and mix and match their parts to make Lizzy and Jo figures.

The problem is, Jo is a black woman. I thought it wouldn't be hard to find a POC female Lego mini-fig, but I was wrong. There aren't any. Confused, I went to the official Lego site to see if I was missing something, and I found this.

It's under the frequently asked questions, so I'm not the first person to notice that hardly any Lego figures have brown skin. They say the yellow is a "neutral color" and they didn't want to assign specific ethnicity.

Because everyone knows that yellow is neutral, right? Right?

They also say they will use different skin tones for figures based on movies and so forth in which they're going for more realism, but somehow that's different. Because I guess there aren't that many Lego sets based on movies, and anyway we all know how diverse the typical movie cast is, right? Right?

Harry Potter
Star Wars
The Hobbit
Lord of the Rings
Toy Story
Marvel and DC Superheroes
Man of Steel
Pirates of the Caribbean
Lone Ranger
Raiders of the Lost Ark
etc etc etc

But don't worry, there ARE Lego minifigs out there that have brown skin! In addition to some really, really hard to find sports figures (mostly basketball players, all male), there are:

Nick Fury, from the superheroes set

Vartruvius, from the Lego Movie--you know, the movie in which all the other characters (except Shaq) have yellow skin, because this is not based on real life

And a werewolf! Although I guess that's supposed to represent brown fur. I guess. I hope.

I sent Lego a short, polite email asking if they could make more female figures, and start making some figures with brown skin. They never replied. Edited to Add: OOPS, should have checked my spam filter before I wrote that: they did reply, with a long and canned-sounding (but polite) response in which they said (in part) this: "we believe skin color is not important so we've given most of our mini-figures a neutral (yellow) skin." /headdesk

Not how giveaways work

Every so often I list a giveaway on Goodreads for one of my books. I figure it's worth it even if it only bumps my sales by single digits (which seems to be the case). I usually get between 1,000 and 1,400 entries to each giveaway, with around 1/3 of people entering also listing the book as "to read." After each giveaway is completed, Goodreads sends me the winner's name and address and I inscribe the book, tuck a bookmark in the front, wrap it up, and mail it. Over the next few weeks a percentage of the people who listed the book as "to read" will delete it, which doesn't bother me. Sometimes the winner of the book will review it, usually they don't. That doesn't bother me either.

Here are some things that bother me.

Person A enters the giveaway, lists my book as "to read," and gives it a five-star rating. Now don't get me wrong, I love it when someone gives one of my books five stars. But I get uncomfortable when I'm 99% sure that the rater hasn't read the book. I suspect the five-star raters think that I'm the one who picks the giveaway winners and they're trying to influence me to pick them. Goodreads picks the winners and it's done by computer.

Person B enters the giveaway but doesn't win. They then give my book a one-star rating.

Sometimes Person A and Person B are the same person.

Person C enters the giveaway, doesn't win, and sends me a message asking for a copy of the book. Sometimes they friend me first, which makes this extra awkward.

Here's the thing, Person C. Writing a book takes a long time, and revising and editing it take even longer. I know I'm not a big-name writer. My publishers are small, my books are not on the shelves of brick-and-mortar stores, and even avid readers of fantasy most likely won't have heard of me. But that doesn't mean I don't work very hard at my craft. It doesn't mean my publishers and editors and cover artists etc. don't work very hard at what they do too. When one of my books is released, we all have bright hopes that people will find it, buy it, read it, like it, and give it five star ratings and reviews all over the place.

So why do you think I should just give you a free copy?

Sometimes Person C is a book blogger who wants a free copy (or two, or three, or seven--I'm not making this up). Those folks I refer to the book's publisher, who can evaluate the request and decide whether to send a review copy.

More often Person C just really wants the book and figures I gave one copy away, I probably have stacks of them lying around and it won't hurt me to give them one. After all, they're going to review it! And tell all their friends about it!

But I don't have stacks of my books lying around. My books are mostly published in ebook editions, with print-on-demand copies available. Sometimes I'm sent hardcopies by the publisher, sometimes I'm not. If I'm not, I buy a copy or two myself for giveaways (Goodreads giveaways are only for print copies of books). It's not cheap, nor is the packaging and postage cheap.I don't make a lot of money from my writing. I can't afford to give a copy away to anyone who asks.

Do you really, really, really want to read my books? Please do me and my publishers a favor. Buy a copy. They're not expensive. When you buy one of my books you keep my publishers in business and give me a little bit of money to repay me for all the work I put into creating the book for you to read.

Google Hates Me

I was going to talk about my day yesterday, which involved a five-mile hike, the planting of many flowers and tomatoes, the scattering of my mother's ashes, and my nearly fatal tumble down some steps (okay, not nearly fatal; I just skinned one knee slightly and bruised my lip). But then Blogger pulled the thing where I have to upgrade to their NEW AND IMPROVED YEAH RIGHT interface.

Why? Why why why? Gmail just got a new interface too, and I hate it for the same reasons I hate the new Blogger one: I can't read it properly. My work computer (not that I ever, ever use my work computer for anything but work; this is merely hypothetical) is very old and can't display the new interfaces correctly. On my home computer, the fields in the new interfaces are so washed out I have trouble even seeing them, much less reading them. On my laptop, the new interfaces are too spread out for me to read comfortably on the small screen.

In other words, it's BROKEN when the old versions weren't broken at all. I am now directing waves of hate at Google, who of course runs Gmail and Blogger and obviously doesn't have enough to do.

For those of you who are interested in seeing lots of pretty pictures of my hike, I've started a new blog just for my hiking stuff called Hiking Hot.

What the hell, California Pizza Kitchen?

Seriously, what the hell is this? I open up the pizza and it's, like, maybe a cup and a half of shredded cheese and spinach that isn't even stuck to the dough, and it's sliding all over the place and half of it falls off when I open the plastic packaging. I had to add my own cheese to make it pizza-like instead of like a piece of toast with a sprinkling of cheese.

So California Pizza Kitchen can kiss my ass. Also, did I mention I have a camera now?

Heavy sighs all around

For about half a year, Jim C. Hines has been running First Book Friday, which I've really enjoyed reading. They're posts by various authors--usually fantasy authors, but not always--talking about their first sales and how they came about. In my memory, all the stories are atypical--no one ever does what we're supposed to do: writes a good book, finds an agent, and the agent sells the book to a publisher. This afternoon (because, you know, I don't have enough to do) I went through all 33 posts and reread them, and actually kept track of how each author got his or her first book sale.

It actually was pretty surprising, although admittedly it's a small sample. I made very broad categories as I went, and here they are:

Got an agent, got a publisher - 14
Approached publisher directly - 5
Tie-in novel/revived career in different genre - 3
Helped by established pro - 8
Self-published/got small publisher first, then agent - 2
Self-published only - 1

Where there was a year mentioned, I jotted it down--1985, 1987, 2000 (three reports), 2003 (two reports), 2004 (two reports), 2007 (two reports). A few authors mentioned how much easier it was to find a publisher ten or fifteen years ago compared to now.

So after reading all those accounts, I'm now bitterly depressed (although breaking the stupid lawn mower earlier today probably didn't help). While many authors said that they'd written lots of books before they sold their first one, I don't think anyone has written as many unpublishable books as me.

Seriously, here they are--and these are just the ones I can remember, and doesn't even count the awful books I wrote when I was in middle school, high school, and right after college:

late 1990s - The Ghost in the Snow, The Rooftops of Simminee Soo, some book about a dragon I can't remember the title of, Weaver's Shroud
early/mid 2000s - a different book about a dragon, Evil Outfitters Ltd., The Weredeer, Jack of All Trades
late 2000s - Stag at Bay, Stag in Velvet, The Taste of Magic, Blood and Taxes, The Dragon Whisperer
2010/2011 - The Trickster Society, Shadows over Oakhill, Bell-Men, Bloodhound (well, Bloodhound will be finished this week, anyway)

That's 17! And yes, I've sold three to small publishers with two more under contract to other small publishers. But where's my big payoff for years and years of hard work? I've queried 43 agents about Bell-Men, which is easily my strongest work, with only two partial requests and no interest whatsoever. Yeah, Angry Robot still has the full, but the odds are very slim that it'll make it to the next tier of reading. Meanwhile, I'm writing more books and editing/revising old ones, and working hard all the time to improve. I know I'm not a bad writer. I know I'm writing at a professional level. I just wish someone else would see that.

Hmm. I didn't actually mean to end up ranting. I really, truly meant to just give some interesting statistics about those First Book Fridays. Oh well.

Bad Publisher! No Cookie!

A few weeks ago I read (and reviewed) the awesomely-titled and fun book The Mall of Cthulhu by Seamus Cooper (pen name of Brendan Halpin). Turns out he's having trouble with his publisher, Night Shade Books, which is screwing him over regarding ebook rights and his royalty statements. There's a good overview of the situation over at The Speculative Scotsman, or you can go to Halpin's own blog for a bit more information. Apparently author Liz Williams (author of Snake Agent, which is sitting close to the top of my to-read pile) is having similar problems with Night Shade Books.

Night Shade is (was) a well respected small SF/F press. Now they're proving that they have the business ethics and practices of a start-up POD publisher run by a failed PublishAmerica author out of his apartment. And the really scary thing is: Night Shade Books doesn't take unagented submissions. The authors being screwed over not only have agents, they have very good agents. If even a good agent can't get a respected publisher to A) return calls, B) fulfill contractual obligations, and C) issue corrected royalty statements, what kind of treatment can we unagented authors expect from less-well-respected publishers?

A few months ago I was offered a contract by An Unnamed Small Publisher for The Taste of Magic. The contract they offered me was a shocker. I forwarded a copy to Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, and emailed the publisher to request clarification and see if any of the offending points could be negotiated. The contract wasn't negotiable so I withdrew my manuscript, and good thing too: Victoria Strauss wrote me back and pointed out a few other things wrong with the contract that I hadn't known enough to flag.

It's a dangerous world out there for writers who want to be published, even if we're careful and do our research. I'm starting to see the wisdom of joining a professional group like SFWA or The Author's Guild just for the legal backing they can provide in situations like the ones going on now with Night Shade Books. I just hope the Night Shade authors can get their issues sorted out fairly without having to resort to legal action.

Update: Night Shade Books have apologized to their authors and readers and promise they'll do better. Halpin talks about the apology here in an update to his blog.

Best-laid plans

Well, the farmer's market in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, City of Assholes was a bust. Although I've sold there before with no problems, it turns out you actually have to be a "member" to sell--which involves both a fee and an inspection, which of course means backyard gardeners like me are automatically excluded. The old battleaxe who told me seemed delighted to run someone off. She must live for moments like that.

On the other hand, I got rid of a flat of peppers before she muscled in on me, and had some interesting conversations with some nice people who didn't seem to mind that I was practically pushing plants into their arms ("no, really, you can have this one for a quarter--or actually, just take it").

I don't have to be at work until noon tomorrow (although I have to stay late tomorrow night), so in the morning I plan to go to the municipal building in my little town and make sure that the farmer's market here doesn't require me to pay anybody anything first. It turns out that our farmer's market is on Monday afternoons--gawd knows who decided that--so if I'm given the all-clear, I'll need to arrange to take a few Monday afternoons off work over the summer. Twist my arm.

After yesterday morning's disappointment, of course I spent the afternoon updating my agent queries list and making new and ever-more-discouraging spreadsheets to let me know just precisely how each of my novels has fared in the agent search. Short answer: I still don't have an agent. I also sent off five more queries for Bell-Men even though I've only heard back from ten of the twenty I queried at the end of March.

Usually when I update my records like that, I get a few coincidental rejections within a few hours. Alas, this weekend I have received nothing. In every possible way.

Quitcher bitchin

There's a link going around to a Salon article by an anonymous writer talking about how difficult it is to be a midlister. It's an interesting article, but by the end of it, I was frankly fed up with anonymous writer. Basically, she's upset because her first book got her a six-figure advance but didn't do well, and her next three books have gotten her smaller and smaller advances--barely five figures!--and only one has earned out, and that one that's earned out was the smallest advance of all, and she's all sad because she's had to take a day job.

Excuse me while I tune up the world's tiniest violin.

I think big advances are a big problem. Agents push for them because they get paid right away, writers want them because hey, money!, and publishers--well, I have no idea why publishers offer bloated advances. I do know that the higher the advance, the longer a book takes to earn out. Duh. That was fine back in the olden days when only, like, four books were published every year and they stayed on bookshelves for decades before being returned and remaindered. Things move a lot faster now. Oh, and there's a recession on.

So no, I'm not very sympathetic to an author who's written four books in two decades and is whining because she finally has to get a day job. My advice: write more books and branch out into genre fiction if you really want to keep the money coming in. In the meantime, I'll be cranking out one or two books a year and hoping to eventually sell one to a big publisher and get a low four-figure advance. I won't be able to quit my day job, but I never expected to.

My thoughts mesh beautifully with Aaron Polson's post today about short fiction pay rates, incidentally. Also, I'm seriously considering writing one of those cheesy category romances. Apparently that's where the money's at, if you write enough of them. The advances are low, but they almost always earn out.

The words, they BURN

I just finished Vampirates: Demons of the Ocean by Justin Somper. It was very bad. Not Return to Quag Keep bad, but definitely "Little, Brown published this?" bad. Spoilers ahead--lots of spoilers--so if you are fool enough to want to read Vampirates, you might not want to read on. Or then again, maybe you ought to.

First of all, the two good things about the book: the cover art, which is truly awesome, and the idea of vampirates. They're vampires and pirates!

In the hands of a decent writer--note that I don't even require a good writer for this, just a decent one--the book might have been a lot of fun. Grace and Connor are 14-year-old twins who have grown up in a lighthouse that their father owns and runs. When he dies, they set out to sea to avoid the orphanage, but a storm sinks their boat. Connor is rescued by a pirate ship, but Grace is rescued by a vampirate ship. Each worries that the other is dead.

The problem is, Somper is a terrible writer. His prose is leaden, his dialogue stilted, his characters completely one-dimensional, his pacing lethargic. Here's a fine example of his writing, from page 99:

"'Drink the hot chocolate,' said a voice inside her. It belonged to a whisper inside her head. 'Drink.'
"She had heard that voice before. It belonged to the captain."

Somper is a master of telling instead of showing. I've read self-published books whose authors didn't have such a perfect grasp of telling. We're told that Connor is a brilliant athlete and that Grace is blindingly intelligent, and that despite these gifts that both children have always felt like outsiders. Apparently their blinding Mary-Sue-ishness repels people, as well it should. (Oh, and Grace hides her intelligence so well that she comes across as dumb as a stump and about as perceptive as one too. Despite her obsession with the vampirate sea chanty her father always sang to her and her brother, it takes her a week to figure out she's on a vampirate ship.)

But the writing is only part of the problem. After the twins are rescued separately, they have separate adventures. Here's where major spoilers come in, because I want to contrast the twins' adventures.

Connor, on the pirate ship, is accepted by the pirates, makes some friends, saves the captain from two thieves who smuggled themselves on board to assassinate him, is given a swordfighting lesson (he's a natural, of course), takes part in a pirate raid, drinks part of a beer in a tavern to celebrate, and then rushes to save his sister when he learns of her whereabouts. Also, his dad gives him advice from beyond the grave.

Grace, on the vampirate ship, is locked in a cabin for her own safety, protected by an Irish vampire named Lorcan (he doesn't actually sparkle, but I wouldn't have been surprised), talks to the vampirate captain briefly, wanders around belowdeck and finds the kitchen where she helps the cook chop vegetables, is menaced by a vampire and rescued by the captain, and finally is rescued by her brother. Her father does not give her advice from beyond the grave, possibly because the only possible advice is "Wait here until you're rescued again," and she should already know that.

Who has the more interesting adventure? The boy, of course. Boys have adventures. Girls help cook and get kidnapped. Grace even remembers at one point that she learned porridge is good for her in home economics class. Um, home ec had already been discontinued from school curricula when I was a kid, and that was back in the 1980s.

And let's just talk about the setting. The book takes place in the year 2505 for no apparent reason. There are a few vague mentions of there having been a cataclysmic flood, but it doesn't seem to have made much difference in the world except that, oddly enough, there's very little technology. The pirate boats seem to be galleons, although from the number of crew (at least 120, from what I could figure from the numbers given in various spots), they're galleons the size of the Queen Mary. That would explain why the pirates each have their own cabins, with beds and everything. It would also at least partly explain why the ships seem to be so completely free from ship-like motion. The pirate ship pulls up next to its victim and apparently parks there while the pirates run across on metal bridges. I'm not making this up.

I can see that Somper might want to make up his own fantasy world in order to keep from having to research olden times. It's clear from the labored sections on swordfighting that he was already exhausted from reading Wikipedia and had no energy left for researching pirates, ships, history, or anything else. What I cannot forgive is sloppy worldbuilding. I can accept that this is 500 years in the future and a giant flood has somehow caused technology to crumble, but please, just explain to me right now why the ships should have cannons but there are no guns. All the pirates fight with swords--lots of different swords! Like broadswords! Because broadswords are totally appropriate for fighting in the close quarters of a ship.

I didn't mean to make this so long, but I must touch on the character of Cheng Li. Somper doesn't describe anyone except for eye color and hair color, but I'm pretty sure Cheng Li is Asian. I'm also pretty sure that's a Chinese name. So that explains why she uses katanas as her swords of choice, because of course a Chinese pirate would use a Japanese sword.

Shoot me now. Better yet, shoot this godawful book.

Spoilers ahead

I've debated writing this post since I finished reading The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. I really liked the book except for one thing. It's a minor issue, not important to the plot, just a revelation at the very end that a character we think of as one thing is actually another thing. It's the equivalent of the stupid joke at the end of the sitcom, the one that makes everyone laugh.

Except that it's more than that, and it really bothered me. A lot. I can't explain without spoilering the whole issue, so proceed at your own risk.

Spoiler below, okay?

Okay, so the book is about a group of four kids who are recruited by the kindly Mr. Benedict to infiltrate a private school. The school is the cover for a mad scientist's plan to control the world by broadcasting subliminal messages through radio and TV signals. It's fun and the characters are interesting: Reynie the puzzle-solver, who becomes the group's informal leader; nervous and brilliant Sticky, a black boy with an eidetic memory; Kate, energetic and spunky--she ran away to join the circus so many times they let her stay; and Constance, who expresses her crankiness by making up silly rhymes.

It's Constance that's the problem. She's described as a little person, and I kept thinking about it all through the book because I've never read a kid's book with a little person as the main character. I kept thinking about how important it would be for a kid with dwarfism or some other related issue to pick up this book and find someone like him, who's part of an adventurous team of kids and treated just like everyone else.

Except that at the end, Constance is revealed to be not a little person at all, but an especially precocious three-year-old.

Leaving aside the fact that NO ONE would mistake a three-year-old--no matter how precocious--for a ten-year-old little person, certainly not the three-year-old's best friends, the real little person reading this book suddenly gets a punch in the gut. Constance wasn't just like him after all. In fact, it's an insult: little people are indistinguishable from small children, and oh no, I'm sure they never get treated like that at all ever, right?

It left a really bad taste in my mouth. I just had to vent about it.

The troubling state of the mystery novel

I used to read mysteries all the time. For many years, in fact, I read almost nothing but mysteries. Some of my favorite authors were Joan Hess, Susan Conant, Robert Bernard, Marian Babson, C.L. Grace, and of course Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. But I also read crappy mysteries by less-than-great writers, mostly because I discovered the genre in my early 20s (rather than growing up steeped in it like fantasy) and for a while couldn't get enough of it.

Now every time I pick up a mystery, I find it hard to get through even a few chapters. I can't tell you how sick I am of the gimmick every mystery now has to have: this one's about a sleuth who QUILTS, this one's a sleuth who LOVES FERRETS, this one owns a COFFEE SHOP, this one has her own RADIO SHOW. Whatever happened to letting the characters be intrinsically interesting without a gimmick to hook in the yoga enthusiasts or cooks or doll collectors?

And those hooks don't work anyway, because the mysteries are as paint-by-numbered as any Harlequin. I like cozy mysteries, the kind with an amateur sleuth who stumbles across a murder by accident and feels compelled to investigate. Lately, every mystery I've picked up has followed this precise plot:

The main character is a spunky 30-ish woman, independent and single and quirky (see the gimmick, usually splashed all over the cover: 'A Ferret Fancier Mystery' or whatever). During the course of a normal day at the quilting bee/ferret fancier club/coffee shop/radio station, the MC discovers a body in an unlikely place, killed in an unlikely way. The police are called in, and MC is questioned by an antagonistic police detective. MC and Cop instantly hate each other, but MC is forced to admit that she finds Cop ruggedly handsome, but she would rather die than let him know. He is a world-weary man who has seen too much of the bad things people do, and he's sworn off women because of his horrible ex-wife. MC is incensed when she realizes Cop suspects she is the murderer, and she decides to prove him wrong by finding the real killer (and/or the murderer was a fellow quilting enthusiast, ferret fancier, etc. or a rival in some way relating to the gimmick and MC suspects her insider knowledge of quilting/ferrets/whatever will help her find the killer after Cop refuses to acknowledge that she could help him). During most of the book, MC pokes her nose into ludicrously dangerous/improbable/socially awkward situations and manages to extract information the police can't get through ordinary methods. Cop is furious at her meddling and threatens to arrest her if she doesn't stop, but of course she is made of sterner stuff than that and just goes right on meddling (in sequels, Cop will occasionally make good on his threat to arrest her, but he lets her go again once he thinks she's learned her lesson--and at that point, I always quit reading the series if MC doesn't dump him right then and there). Using an obscure piece of trivia only known to quilters/ferret fanciers/etc., MC guesses who the murderer is but not why he/she committed the murder ("It has to be Jane--she's the only one who would know that silver-tipped Montana ferrets are deathly allergic to peanuts"). MC eventually discovers the Awful Truth behind the murder, and is at that point in such danger that Cop insists on becoming her personal bodyguard until the killer is caught. MC and Cop soon discover that they are madly attracted to each other, although they do not usually have sex until the sequel (and even then they're probably interrupted by another murder before they get very far). Against Cop's orders, MC plans a trap for the killer that takes place at the quilt judging at the state fair/the ferret show/etc. While MC is in terrible danger, she outwits the killer and is saved at the last second by Cop, who only pretended he wasn't going to help her out and was secretly moving in with his men all along.

Good writing and fun characters can make this plot work, but there's precious little of both around these days. Setting takes the place of good writing, and gimmicks take the place of fun characters. If anyone knows of any good cozy mysteries being published now that don't follow the guidelines above, please please please let me know!

New month, same as the old month

I can't believe it'll be May in a few hours. We're 1/3 of the way through 2009.

I had one acceptance in April, two rejections. So far I've made one sale every month of the year. It'd be cool if I could keep that up, but since I've pretty much decided to stop writing short stories--unless the mood just takes me--that's probably not going to happen. I've only got four or five active short stories out in submissionland now, and two of those need to be reworked before I send them out again.

Still haven't heard back from the agent who requested my full last fall. I think I can safely stop expecting to hear back from her ever. I'm pretty sick of the whole agent thing right now anyway. The whole #queryfail, #agentfail issue recently did two things for me: it humanized agents, when before I sort of thought of them as an abstract collective entity, and it also made me realize that agents, like a lot of other humans, are jerks. Add to that the zero interest I've gotten from agents about The Taste of Magic--which, dammit, is an extremely good book--and the fact that fully half of the agents I've queried about it haven't never bothered to respond at all (eight rejects out of fifteen queries in February and March), and I'm fed up with having to deal with a middleman anyway. Agents can go jump off a bridge.

Still haven't heard back about my novella, either. I sent a status query to the editor this afternoon, since it's been three months and the editor said it would probably be two months before I heard back. I hope the attachment wasn't eaten by the internets.

And I haven't heard back about the rewritten time travel story, although I no longer care. That was the story that killed short stories for me.

So basically, the last month has been just like the previous several months: I hear nothing from nobody, and the ringing silence makes me doubt my worth as a writer. Do you know, that time travel story derailed me so completely that I think I've written maybe 3,000 words all month? I really need to stop brooding over things I have no control over and just damn well write--but what's the point, if sending the new stuff out means even more editors/agents ignoring me?

These end-of-month posts make me grim. Maybe you hadn't noticed.

Worst book ever. A rant.

I just finished reading Return to Quag Keep by Andre Norton and Jean Rabe. It was published in 2006 by Tor in hardback (although I bought it at a used book store for six bucks) with a cover price of $24.95.

I hope no one paid $24.95 plus tax for this book. Because it is the worst book I have ever read and ever will read.

Here's why:

Item A) I read Quag Keep by Andre Norton (published in the late 1970s) when I was in middle school, which was just the right age to appreciate Andre Norton. I've reread Quag Keep many times--it's sort of a guilty pleasure now. It would be hard to match that sort of personal cult classic feel in any case, even by Andre Norton at the top of her game.

Item B) This book is badly written. It is badly written. It is BADLY WRITTEN. And not, I suspect, by Andre Norton. It doesn't feel like Norton's writing at all--and I believe Norton died right about the time this book was published, so I suspect she wasn't physically capable of writing and that in her collaboration with Jean Rabe she was probably as more of an idea person. I could be wrong, of course: Norton was an uneven writer, sometimes brilliant and sometimes not very good. But lordie, she was never this bad. I blame Rabe completely.

Item B1) The characters are virtually interchangeable. They all speak alike, act alike, react alike, and are all Too Stupid To Live.
Item B2) The characters are nothing like the original characters in Quag Keep.
Item B3) The writing is so clumsy, stilted, awkward, and amateurish it's actually painful to read. And the headhopping is so out of control that sometimes even the author seemed uncertain as to whose eyes she was looking out of in any given paragraph.
Item B4) Infodumping! About things that aren't important! Like when the song "Danny Boy" was written and how big Mammoth Cave is!
Item B5) Passive voice. Constantly.

Item C) The plot of Quag Keep felt like a D&D adventure run by a really good, inventive gamemaster. The plot of Return to Quag Keep felt like a D&D adventure run by a lame gamemaster who can't think past all the cliches she's steeped herself in. And no, it wasn't parody. Let's see: Characters get drunk and start a fight in a tavern, end up working as guards in a caravan (no, seriously--that's like Cliche #1 in the Big Book of Cliches), get attacked by skeletons, get attacked by brigands--and it just keeps going on and on and on, without getting any better. And don't forget the deus ex machina teleport spell!

Item D) The character I liked best in Quag Keep was the lizardman, Gulth. I even had a stuffed animal alligator I named Gulth who sat on top of my jewelry box to guard it (look, I told you I was in middle school when I read the book). Gulth appeared in chapter one of Return to Quag Keep, long enough to tell the others that he was dying and was going to travel somewhere to try and find help. Then he disappears from the book entirely until literally the last three pages.

Items E-ZZZ) The issues clumsily raised over the course of the book ARE NOT RESOLVED AT ALL. The ending SUCKS. There is NO CLOSURE. I HATE THIS BOOK.

In short, everything about this book is gratingly bad. That it was released in hardback by a major publisher is simply appalling. It's an insult to Andre Norton's career, an insult to people who enjoyed Quag Keep, and--worst of all--it's an insult by Tor Books to their readers, since the implication is that Tor assumes that their readers will buy anything with Andre Norton's name on the cover, regardless of quality.

Best-laid plans

Ugh, what a day. I hardly got anything done, despite all my plans.

I started out well. I sent two queries out to agents this morning, and I paid the utility bill, and then I went hiking for a few hours. The lower paths are surrounded by bloodroot, trout lilies, and spring beauties, which are all blooming like crazy. When I got back, I washed Mom's car and then mine, at which point Mom pointed out that my tags were expired.

So I ran into Clinton to pay my registration, and discovered that Toyota Financial had never bothered to send the Pennsylvania title to Tennessee when the Tennessee DMV had requested last year (because I'd bought the car in PA and then moved to TN), which meant I couldn't renew my registration. I spent the next three hours making phone calls, trying to get everything resolved. Finally, about 4:30, I got it all sorted and finally got the stupid orange sticker for my tags. It all ended well--with pizza--but it totally blew my afternoon plans.

I tried to read the Jack of All Trades proofs after supper, but after one chapter I realized I was too distracted to do it justice and I'd better put it off to this weekend. I went to take a shower instead, and didn't notice until I started reaching for the shampoo bottle for the third time that I was still pretty distracted. At least my hair is incredibly clean now.

One bright note: I got The Crown Conspiracy by Michael J. Sullivan in the mail today. I've only read the first page, but the writing is good. So since our nice warm weather has turned blustery and rainy and cold, I think I'll settle down to read until bedtime.

Foils raccoons and pesky humans

I woke up at five to a horribly inhuman snarling, growling, and whimpering practically right outside my window. Of course it was the neighbors.

*rimshot*

My neighbors--the ones I loathe, and did I mention that Mom says the guy is on the Tennessee sex offender list?*--have a Havahart trap on their garbage cans to trap raccoons. I guess it's easier to trap a raccoon and relocate/kill it than it is to, oh, BUY A BUNGEE CORD to tie down the can lids.

I peeked out the bedroom window and had a good view of the trap, containing one big fat raccoon. Three big fat raccoons were trying to get their buddy out, to no avail. Finally they gave up, and when they had gone the trapped raccoon fell silent. So I tried to get back to sleep before my alarm went off at six.

And of course I couldn't sleep for worrying about the raccoon, and at 5:30 I got up, pulled on a jacket and my shoes, and went outside.

The raccoon was all huddled up in the rain. Now, I've opened a Havahart trap before--with a skunk in it, no less--but that was about 15 years ago. I couldn't remember how it worked now. But hey, I'm a human being, the supreme tool-user, with opposable thumbs and everything.

So after ten minutes I went back in and turned on the internet. Which FAILED ME. I finally found a list of manuals on the Havahart site and guessed at which trap my neighbors had (a really old, crappy one, apparently), and found out how to open it. With a really bad diagram. Apparently one wrenches up on the door and props it open with a stick. Not included.

It's November. All the sticks I could find broke when I looked at them. And it was raining harder, and my accursed neighbors seem to be awake now. So I failed to save the raccoon.

But I swear to gawd or dawg or whoever, I'm going to break their damn trap. I'm a clever human being, after all. And I know where I can get a set of boltcutters.

*all the guys I went to high school have "issues." It's probably why I'm still single.

Intellectual rights, my butt

You can blame my boss for this entry, because she came in to the office with a sheet of gold-foil stampy things--some kind of faux Easter seals or something--and asked me if I wrote letters. Because I'm always writing in a notebook, and it must be letters, right? So I told her no, I was writing a novel, and we laughed, and I told her about Nano and all. And she said, "Oh, you'll have to let me read it when you're done" and I said I would when it was published one day, and then she got a funny look on her face.

"You know, I don't care, but don't let anyone else know you're writing a book during working hours. Because if they found out, the college can claim intellectual rights to the book."

I've heard this before. The argument goes that since the writer is being paid for the job, everything they produce while being paid should belong to the employer. I've heard that some companies have even latched onto ideas that their employees have had, because the employees must have had the ideas on the job and therefore the employers own them. The ideas, not the employees. Although it's a fine line at that point.

So, can the college claim The Taste of Magic is their intellectual property? Will they? I don't know why they'd bother--it's a fantasy novel that isn't all that well written (I'd love to be a great writer, but I know I'm not and I'm okay with just being a writer who writes fun books with appealing characters), and mediocre fantasy novels are a dime a dozen. No, actually, they're free. Take one. I have a bunch.

But I'd rather burn the manuscript than let some entity claim it's theirs because I wrote it on the clock. And let's just split some hairs about that too. Sometimes I write on the clock. Most of the time I don't. Do parts of the book belong to the college and the rest belong to me? What about revisions? I always do revisions at home. The college is welcome to the rough draft--it's certainly not worth jack. And the characters, world, and most of the plot was invented at home on my own time. Some plot twists came to me at work, but plot twists are worthless on their own.

So no, I don't think the college, or any other entity, owns my books. I own my creative output no matter when or where it's produced. If the college dislikes me writing on the clock, they can fire me. They can't take my book.